Personal care products, particularly cleansing and conditioning products, have traditionally been marketed in a variety of forms such as bar soaps, creams, lotions, and gels. Typically, these products must satisfy a number of criteria to be acceptable to consumers. These criteria include cleansing effectiveness, skin feel, mildness to skin, hair, and ocular mucosae, and lather volume. Ideal personal cleansers should gently cleanse the skin or hair, cause little or no irritation, and should not leave the skin or hair overly dry after frequent use. Further, cleansing compositions, particularly shampoos, designed for use with children should exhibit mildness to the ocular mucosae, and no or minimal eye sting, should material from the cleansing composition be placed in the eye.
It is highly desirable to deliver cleansing and conditioning benefits from a disposable substrate. Disposable products are convenient because they obviate the need to carry or store cumbersome bottles, bars, jars, tubes, and other forms of clutter associated with cleansing products and other products capable of providing therapeutic or aesthetic benefits. Disposable products are also a more sanitary alternative to the use of a sponge, washcloth, or other cleansing implement intended for extensive reuse, because such implements can develop bacterial growth, unpleasant odors, and other undesirable characteristics related to repeated use.
There is also a need for personal care articles, such as disposable washcloths, which can be easily used by young children. Such child-friendly personal care products must be easy to handle and the child must easily understand the method of utilizing them. Furthermore, any such products should ideally be suitable for use by consumers of different ages, e.g. children, sizes and/or stages of development.
This is especially true of so-called “one size fits all” wash mittens, such as a wash mitt which is suitable for children of all sizes. Typically, the products are designed to allow most users to be able to use the product. However, this effectively means a mitt which is far bigger than most user's hand a results in poor product performance and/or unintentional removal of the mitt during use. The alternative of providing a selection of sizes of mitts for different sized user's, while seemingly attractive, results in increased cost of producing, storing, delivering etc, the different sized mitts.
The need remains for disposable cleaning products, especially wash mitts, which are easy to use and suitable for use by consumers of different ages, size and/or stages of development, especially products which are suitable children of different ages.